Trump Jr. to make appearance at Neshoba County Fair but won’t speak, Fair board confirms

Tuesday, July 19, 2016 11:04 AM

Donald Trump Jr. will make an appearance at the Neshoba County Fair Tuesday afternoon but won’t speak, Fair board member Scott Bounds confirmed Tuesday.

While presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is not scheduled to speak at the Neshoba County Fair, his son will make an appearance, Bounds, a state Representative and entertainment chairman, confirmed.

“We have confirmed that Trump Jr. will be there Tuesday afternoon and into early Tuesday night,” Bounds said. “He is not scheduled to speak but he will be on the Fairgrounds. We don’t have an estimated time of arrival.”

Efforts had earlier been ongoing between the Mississippi Trump campaign personnel and the Fair Association to secure the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States to speak at the upcoming Fair, officials said. However, these efforts were not able to materialize collaboratively, they said.

“With the Fair being right on the heels of the convention, we just weren’t able to work out a schedule for Donald Trump,” Bounds said. “We were preparing for him to come but we just weren’t able to put it together.”

Neshoba County Fair Association President Gilbert Donald said earlier that they appreciate greatly the efforts the Mississippi Trump campaign personnel had expended “in an attempt to secure Mr. [Donald] Trump to speak at the Fair.”

Mississippi Committee Chairman Mitch Tyner was quoted earlier by WTVA Tupelo saying: “We are working very hard to try and get him here for the Neshoba County Fair. Gov. Phil Bryant even announced he’d personally invited Trump.

“One of the first things that we continue to tell him is that it was the first place Ronald Reagan went after he got the nomination,” Tyner told WTVA. In 1980, then-Republican presidential nominee Reagan spoke at the Fair on Sunday, Aug. 3, 1980.

Nationally, Democrats criticized Reagan and still accuse him of coming to the Fair to “wink at the Klan” because of the 1964 civil rights murders in Neshoba County. An audio recording of that speech which surfaced about a decade ago reveals no reaction from the crowd when Reagan brought up states’ rights in the context of smaller, limited government — and not segregation.

The Fair starts Friday.

Established in 1889, the Neshoba County Fair, Mississippi’s Giant House Party, is marking its 127th year in 2016.